Chapter XI · Through the Gate of Dreams (continued 2)

As Sister’s husband was just starting in the practice of medicine in a little New England village, and as he had had no experience with such cases outside of his college work, both he and Sister wished me to be with them at the time of her confinement. I also wished to be there, and was planning my work accordingly when, to my consternation, I received a telegram saying: “Read Isaiah IX 6, and come immediately. Both doing well.” Rushing across the hall into the rooms of my neighbours, the Randolphs, I cried, “Give me a Bible, quick! I’m afraid my sister’s got her baby!” And so it was: “Unto us a Child is born; unto us a Son is given.”

What disappointment and anxiety I felt as I journeyed there! It seemed unbelievable that she could go through all that, and I not with her. I felt resentment toward the little being that had come so inopportunely—there she was in her new home, not yet settled, among strangers, all unprepared for what had been happening in the last twenty-four hours!

When I saw her, pale and weak, but smiling through her tears as she guarded the little bundle by her side, I felt an added resentment toward that bundle. I did not even feel drawn to it when I saw the tiny red face; but when he lifted up his voice and wept, the cry, so weak and helpless, went to my heart; from that instant I loved him.

During labour, when they had told my sister that the child would be there before morning, she had exclaimed, “It isn’t so—it can’t be so—Genie can’t get here—I won’t have my baby till Genie gets here!” They laughed at us both for our disappointment over the precipitate outcome.

I stayed with them two weeks—a strenuous, anxious time—and, the very day I left, was taken with what later proved to be gastric fever. Stopping over in Concord a day and a night to see Laidlaw, and have dinner with him and two other class-mates living near, I was so ill that evening that I had to leave the dining room, and that night Laidlaw and his landlady were up with me most of the night. Journeying next day as far as Worcester, I was detained there for two weeks at Dr. Carson’s, where she and Fenton (of the hospital days) took excellent care of me. It was the first time since childhood that I had been “down sick,” but, soon recuperating, I went back to my work in U——.

From that time onward my interests widened—two centres now—Home, and Sister’s home; everything that happened in that New England home was of great moment to me. The baby’s growth and development were topics of never-failing interest. When they came home the next year, how infinitely richer life was with that baby in our midst! How much more wonderful than ordinary babies—his winsome smile, his soft pansy eyes, and that first tooth! I suspect that for the next three years, at least, I taxed to the limit the tolerance of my friends with numerous little stories about my sister’s phenomenal child.

The most intimate, and certainly the most far-reaching, influence which came to me during my life in U—— came through the Randolphs—a physician and his wife who had their home, and the Doctor his office, on the same floor of the building where I had mine. Perhaps a little slow in making friends, they made up for that in steadfastness and helpfulness as time passed. The Doctor was then probably forty years of age—a tall, large-framed man, with a superb head, a fine brow, a firm mouth and chin, a face always pale, but eloquent with the determination to rise above suffering. Neurasthenic, crippled since youth from an injury to one knee, he was subject to frequent breakdowns, was seldom free from pain, and his work, confined to an office practice, was done under great disadvantage. I think he has the kindest eyes I have ever seen—eyes that look deep into the soul, seeing all its frailties and struggles, its triumphs and defeats. To the needs of all who came his comprehension and ready help were assured.

Of Mrs. Randolph’s friendliness one felt less certain; she had even a repellent manner with strangers; she must weigh them in the balance before acceptance, no taking on trust with her. A trim little body, keen of perception and sharp of tongue, she gave one, on meeting her, a sense of openly taking one’s measure. Sometimes you could fairly see her making up her mind; and her “Humph!” was eloquent of her unflattering conclusion. Although really kind-hearted, her range of sympathies, when I first met her, seemed narrow, her judgments harsh and often faulty; it seemed easy for her to condemn and sentence others before she had half the evidence. As time passed it was a study to see her growing and expanding under the Doctor’s more tolerant influence and example, and with her increasing knowledge of life and human sorrows. Sometimes it would be just a mild, “Oh, Ethel, Ethel!” as she would rail at something or somebody; sometimes he would laugh indulgently at her caustic and often accurate “sizing up” of persons who could not, as she would boast, “pull the wool” over her eyes, as they could over “Dearie’s”; again he would drop a word or two that would enlighten her—some extenuating explanation; some recital of good in the one she was condemning. If she pried about any of his patients, his lips would be sealed, but though replying to her abrupt, unwarrantable questions so as not to betray professional secrets, he would, in so doing, help her to view more charitably what she was so readily inclined to condemn. There were times, though, when she would close her lips with a snap, unconvinced, though silent; again she would say she did not believe he knew what he was talking about; or, if he knew, he himself did not believe what he was saying; but more often she would stop her tirade and make a wild dash at him, patting his benevolent face as she exclaimed, “You old Dearie! You think the whole world is as good as you are!” and sometimes she would include, “You and Dr. Arnold—she’s ’most as good as you, but not quite.” And he would smile at her as one would at a spoiled child.

Her devotion to him was beautiful; she tried to keep him from going beyond his strength, for patients, recognizing his tolerant, helpful nature, made many demands upon him; his wife called it imposing upon him; and if she had dared, would often have berated soundly the “whining women” who came to him for help and stayed so long after office hours. I have seen her follow such persons with her scornful glance as they came out of the office, when I knew she was making a tremendous effort to keep her tongue between her teeth. All this, and much more, I could see or divine in my four years’ association with these friends. I saw, too, that as the years passed and sorrows came, she softened and broadened, never, however, losing her spiciness, and never judging either me or “Dearie” as critically as we deserved, however severe she might be with the rest of humanity. She has continued one of my staunchest friends through all the years, and somehow I am always the better for the thought of her unbounded belief in me.

Months before our intimacy grew, she knew of many of my makeshifts and economies, for she kept a sharp lookout upon everything going on in that vicinity—not only in her doctor’s practice, and in mine, but also in that of the other physicians in the huge office-building. I am sure she could have told any one of us what patients were in the habit of coming to our offices, how long they usually stayed, and many other facts gleaned in her numerous little journeys through the corridors.

I spent many evenings in their rooms, and borrowed books from the Doctor’s large library; looked after them when they were ill; and they looked after me that I should not get ill, she in practical ways, and he in help and counsel of an immaterial but quite as essential a nature. As we became better acquainted, she would scold me because I did not have a “decent bed”; would upbraid me for not going more regularly to my boarding-place; or not getting myself more substantial meals. Sometimes when I would come in, worn from a hard case, and too tired to think of supper, she would come and march me into their rooms and, in her brusque but kind way, insist on my taking a cup of tea, or some hot food: “I’ll get the beefsteak into your stomach first, and then Dearie can talk to you about your ‘case’—but not a word till I have my way”; thus would she domineer over me, chide me for neglecting myself, and scold Doctor for not scolding me. There was no nonsense about her; she had no patience with half measures, or with procrastination when promptness was indicated.

It was on a blustering evening in March, during my second year of practice, that something came to me through Dr. Randolph that was the beginning of one of the dearest and deepest joys of my life. And yet another decade was to pass before I was to experience the great friendship toward which a chance act of the Doctor’s on that wild March night so inevitably contributed.

I had been attending a case of puerperal fever, a patient of Dr. Wyeth’s—the Doctor having been suddenly called out of town shortly after the confinement. For two weeks or more it was an anxious time for me. The patient was in a serious condition; she belonged to an influential family; friends and relatives were solicitous, some officious. On my first visit I had found the condition disturbing, and it grew rapidly more so. Pressure was brought to bear on the husband to dismiss “that girl doctor” and employ someone more experienced. My professional skin was painfully thin in those days—it seemed such a crime to be young. I felt such comments keenly, and though I could not have blamed the husband had he yielded to the requests of the friends, he did not. The case pulled through and was a real triumph for me, and later some who had sneered at “the girl doctor” came to her for treatment. But it was a strenuous time, and I was worn and anxious; and in the evening, on returning to the office, it was a great consolation to talk over the case with Dr. Randolph, and listen to his helpful suggestions, or his emphasis of the encouraging symptoms.

On that eventful night in March, though my patient had then passed the danger-point, I was in that overwrought state where I could bear to talk or think only of her. Recognizing this, Dr. Randolph discussed the case with me briefly, congratulating me on the patient’s assured safety, then said firmly: “Now we will dismiss this from our minds. You are going to rest while I read something to you that will make you forget Mrs. Leighton and her pulse and temperature; so lie down and be quiet.” I obeyed.

Seating himself in a big chair beside me, he opened a little olive-green volume and read to me an essay called “Strawberries.”

Jaded, anxious, and overwrought as I was, the crispness and freshness of that essay came to me as the most welcome and delicious restorative I have ever known. I forgot my cares, forgot the blustering March outside, I was transported to summer and sunshine, bobolink music, and the joy of life in heaping measure. My very soul was steeped in summer. I sniffed the clover-scented air of those high upland meadows where wild strawberries grew. I stooped low, parting the grass and daisies, gathering the fragrant berries, while the breath of June meadows came up in my face, and the light and warmth of June skies enveloped me.

The essay finished, Dr. Randolph wrote on the fly-leaf of the book my name and the date, and gave it to me. It was “Locusts and Wild Honey”—the first book of John Burroughs’s that I ever owned, or knew. Were there nothing else to be grateful to the Doctor for, the bestowal of that book, and of all that it later brought into my life, would make me forever deeply his debtor.

For two or more years it was the only book of this author that I owned; but as soon as I could indulge myself in book-buying, his were the first that I secured. I remember so well the three-quarters guilty feeling I had in ordering them; it was such unmitigated self-indulgence; they were so distinctly a purely personal pleasure, and I had so long schooled myself to regard self-indulgence as reprehensible. Here was a sober little Stoic taking almost her first dip into epicureanism; she had many qualms of conscience, but many thrills of pride as well, each time that another olive-green volume was added to the row. The “Strawberries” had done it! Doubtless God might have created a more seductive and more delicious berry, but doubtless God never did!

It was many years after I had grown to know and love the author through his books before I met him face to face. Through his writings I had learned to love all outdoors; to feel a kinship with Nature which had deeply enriched my life; and at length there came a day when I journeyed to his home, sat by his hearth, and felt a deepening of the sense of comradeship that I had felt in reading his books. He became my friend. Many years later I even gathered strawberries with him and Dr. Randolph from the upland meadows of which he had written in that essay which was the means of bringing this rare friendship into my life.

Dr. Randolph had a nickname for me which had grown out of our reading James’s “Psychology” together. There had been a good deal said in the early chapters about “psychosis,” and one day in my attempts to be funny I had said something about “psychosis” being undignified—that James should have said “psychosister”; hence he had dubbed me his “psychosister.”

There had been a time, when my intimacy with the Randolphs began, that I had felt uneasy at the growing friendship. There was charm in the companionship with him, and sympathy and congeniality between us; and when his hand rested on my shoulder in a kindly way I was moved by it, also by the gentleness and consideration he invariably showed me; but I soon began torturing myself with doubts and fears. The fact was, I was no longer innocent: one man, who had no right to, had grown to care for me more than he should, and I began to wonder if this friendship, too, might not turn out in that way. I shrank from such an ending to so beautiful a friendship, then blushed with shame at my unfounded fear. I was experiencing for the first time what, I think, is one of the saddest things about transgressions—the feeling of suspicion toward others that grows in us as soon as we have done wrong ourselves, or have even nibbled at the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But I soon put aside this fear as unworthy of my friend, and enjoyed the intimacy of which I have written—a friendship with which I am still blessed, and which has been one of the most enlarging and ennobling of my life.

Interests outside of medicine claimed some of my time, of which activities in the Working Women’s League, emergency lectures to a Girls’ Friendly Society, and to nurses in one of the city hospitals, membership in a German class, in a Browning club, even in a Plato club, were among the chief. The Browning club, especially, proved intensely interesting—three or four married couples, three spinsters (including myself) and one bashful bachelor. None of us, except Dr. Randolph, knew anything about Browning when we began; the club was not started in the reverential spirit that I fancy most Browning clubs are. At first we ridiculed ourselves and Browning not a little; but if we came to scoff, we remained to pray—or, if we first endured our poet, then pitied ourselves, we ended by embracing Browning. But the last stage was slow in coming; we struggled and puzzled and got entangled; we were helped out by Dr. Randolph, and amused by Mrs. Randolph, who would not stand—only up to a certain point—what she could not understand. She would blurt out, “Oh, mercy! let’s stop this moonshine, and read something we can understand.” And we soon learned that hers was the sensible view—there was so much that was lucid in Browning that we came in time to pity the too-easily discouraged readers who stopped short at the stumbling-blocks.

The Plato Club, conducted by the Universalist minister, was an incongruous affair—the clergyman, a young lawyer, a factory girl who wrote poetry, a Vassar graduate, teachers in the seminary, two seamstresses, a choice assortment of “old maids,” and the “girl doctor.” They met at my office. I got very little from Plato as we read it, but the incongruous assembly was a perpetual delight. In a few months it petered out, but the young lawyer and I formed a club of two and read Emerson together Sunday evenings (until he became engaged), and thus cemented a friendship which has grown and strengthened with the years.

Another of the Browning Club friendships has also proved of lasting delight. Marion Rockwood, a bachelor-maid who had a studio two floors above me, was a splendid, energetic creature with a glorious soprano voice. Both too occupied to see much of each other, we called a greeting in the morning and at night as we went through the halls. I loved to hear her trilling away up there in her sky-top, as she went about busy with household duties, as I with mine. In the years that followed, reverses and sorrows have come to her, but she has sung on when her heart was heavy; sung to supply losses that would have crushed one less stout of heart. Now a great happiness has come into her life; but whatever of joy or sorrow comes, she will always be the dauntless, inimitable creature I knew in the old Browning Club days.

The first taste of real wild life, the first taste of any woods life, since the camp-meeting days, came to me one summer while in U——, when, joining a jolly crowd of young people, with three elders, we camped on Lake Piseco in the Adirondacks for two happy weeks.

After leaving the outposts of civilization, driving over a rough corduroy road for many miles, we camped on that wild mountain lake in a log-camp; rowed, sailed, fished, swam, tramped, climbed mountains, and, one memorable night, having followed all day the T-lake trail (a blazed trail through the deep forest), slept on a bed of boughs in an open camp. Another night we paddled out with a jacklight and saw a deer feeding among the lily pads—a never-to-be-forgotten sight. How flat and cramped and artificial seemed the city life to which we returned after those care-free days in the woods! But I was soon again absorbed in the routine of practice, and in the human problems confronting me.

One of the saddest things in connection with my practice was the loss of a little patient with capillary bronchitis, a lovely child of three. I had done all I could to save her, had had good counsel, and had fought desperately. The defeat came to me as a terrible blow. I reproached myself for not having relinquished the case, feeling sure it was my incompetency that was at fault; that some other physician might have saved her. The continued confidence which the family showed in me was consoling, but I think many such experiences would have tempted me to abandon medicine entirely.

After the third year of practice, my outlook as a physician, though by no means brilliant, was encouraging. My practice was steadily growing, my interests widening, friends and acquaintances increasing. Economy was still necessary, but I had passed through the trying time when expenses far exceeded income, through that when the income crept up till it equalled expenses, and on to that when it exceeded them. Now each month when Father looked over my books he nodded satisfactorily. To him my success was assured.

At this juncture came an urgent call to leave all that I had gained and engage in an entirely new field of medical work—the care of the insane in a distant part of the state—a branch of medicine toward which I had had a strong leaning in College.

I found myself in an unenviable state of indecision, but the seductive letters of the genial Superintendent at the institution at M—— decided me to go to Albany and take the Civil Service examination, and, that being satisfactorily passed, to go on to M—— on a visit of investigation. The visit was most enjoyable; the new life and work drew me powerfully; the assured salary was a great temptation, promising freedom from financial strain; the friendly physicians I met there—all conspired to make me consent to return there for a trial month, as soon as I could arrange matters in U——.

The weeks that followed were busy and exciting. I cleared up my work as well as I could for the month’s absence, but, not willing to burn my bridges, retained my office. It was gratifying to see that patients and friends were unreconciled, even rebellious, at the possibility of my leaving. My evenings at this time were spent mostly with the Randolphs. I knew I should never meet friends like them again. As the days passed we drew nearer in sympathy; we had grown so in the habit of one another that the thought of separation was painful. Sometimes we sat long together saying little, not daring to trust ourselves to speak; then perhaps she would make a dash at me, hug and kiss me vigorously, and rush from the room, only to rush back again, angry at herself for this betrayal of emotion. Popping her head in the door, she would call to the Doctor:

“Come, Dearie, you better come home, too—before you get to snivelling,”—thus saving the situation.

When we said good-bye, the Doctor told me, haltingly, that he could never hope to express what a help I had been to both of them, and to him in particular—“I think you know it, and have known it, and I don’t know just how I am going to get on without my little ‘psychosister.’”

Although my leaving was ostensibly for a trial month, I felt it was probably the termination of my life in U——. Toward the last, one of the surgeons gave me a farewell dinner, and there were luncheons and teas and cosy little suppers among my intimates. And at length came the night for leaving. I took my last supper in the home of Dr. Wyeth where I had always been so warmly welcomed; and she and a jolly crowd of the Adirondack campers went to the train to see me off. With Dr. Wyeth I parted with the keenest regret; her help and loyalty had been a steady light along my path. I knew I was leaving her the lonelier for my going, but she would say no word to keep me from what looked like increasing good fortune for me.

Alone in the train I gave myself up to a good cry. I could get no sleeper till half the journey was made. As I sat, forlorn and disconsolate, the sole occupant of the car, the train-man came in and sat down at the farther end to eat his midnight lunch. He must have pitied my loneliness, for presently he came toward me carrying his piece of pie on the cover of his dinner-pail, and half-shyly, half-gruffly, placed it on my lap. The act touched me, and the pie seemed to take the lump from my aching throat. And when I carried back the cover, I felt so much lighter hearted that I sat and chatted with him till we came to the junction where I took the sleeper for M——. Early in the morning, on reaching the city, I was welcomed to the large institution where my work has since been for so many years.

Here my life has gone on—a busy, eventful, and, I trust, a useful one, among persons grievously afflicted, hampered as they are by vagaries and abnormalities, yet capable of tender affection, of keen appreciation for services rendered, and of a degree of companionship it would be hard for an outsider to comprehend. It has been a life rich in compensations, whatever of deprivation and of limitation it has held; above all, a life rich in friendships—friendships staunch and leal and priceless. And it has been crowned in the later years with a signal friendship which has yielded a measureless satisfaction—a friendship and comradeship with one whom the world calls great, yet who made a place in his heart and life for the “Child of the Drumlins,” as he was wont to name her.

The termination of this record at the beginning of a new epoch in the writer’s life—an epoch when all the lines of character were converging to maturity—gives the reader of necessity a sense of incompleteness. The whole record, as I try to see it from the reader’s point of view, seems to be like

because perforce the superstructure is missing. Yet one who follows the writer’s efforts to gain the image of her own soul may perhaps learn herein the better to know his own and also the souls of others; learn, too, that each of us proceeds on the lines of his own development; and that all that comes into the mature life is but an extension, an unfolding, of all that went before. “Our to-days and yesterdays are the blocks with which we build.” Would that we had builded better!

If it were possible to treat the subsequent epochs as candidly as the earlier ones are here treated, they would not be found lacking in moving events, in dramatic moments, even in tragedies—some in the lives of those closely knit to one’s own, some of the soul only, some in the outer life—but all this cannot be viewed objectively; it is too close—it is a life of yesterday and to-day, while the other, detached, and seen through the Spell of the Past, is as a tale that is told.

THE END